PRESS
RELEASE: Los Alamos National Laboratory team of
scientists prove carbon 14 dating of the Shroud
of Turin wrong

COLUMBUS, Ohio, August 15
— In his presentation today at The Ohio
State University’s Blackwell Center, Los
Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
chemist, Robert Villarreal, disclosed
startling new findings proving that the
sample of material used in 1988 to
Carbon-14 (C-14) date the Shroud of
Turin, which categorized the cloth as a
medieval fake, could not have been from
the original linen cloth because it was
cotton. According to Villarreal, who
lead the LANL team working on the
project, thread samples they examined
from directly adjacent to the C-14
sampling area were “definitely not
linen” and, instead, matched cotton.
Villarreal pointed out that “the [1988]
age-dating process failed to recognize
one of the first rules of analytical
chemistry that any sample taken for
characterization of an area or
population must necessarily be
representative of the whole. The part
must be representative of the whole. Our
analyses of the three thread samples
taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling
corner showed that this was not the
case.” Villarreal also revealed that,
during testing, one of the threads came
apart in the middle forming two separate
pieces. A surface resin, that may have
been holding the two pieces together,
fell off and was analyzed. Surprisingly,
the two ends of the thread had different
chemical compositions, lending credence
to the theory that the threads were
spliced together during a repair.

LANL’s work confirms
the research published in Thermochimica
Acta (Jan. 2005) by the late Raymond
Rogers, a chemist who had studied actual
C-14 samples and concluded the sample
was not part of the original cloth
possibly due to the area having been
repaired. This hypothesis was presented
by M. Sue Benford and Joseph G. Marino
in Orvieto, Italy in 2000. Benford and
Marino proposed that a 16th Century
patch of cotton/linen material was
skillfully spliced into the 1st Century
original Shroud cloth in the region
ultimately used for dating. The
intermixed threads combined to give the
dates found by the labs ranging between
1260 and 1390 AD. Benford and Marino
contend that this expert repair was
necessary to disguise an unauthorized
relic taken from the corner of the
cloth. A paper presented today at the
conference by Benford and Marino, and to
be published in the July/August issue of
the international journal Chemistry
Today, provided additional corroborating
evidence for the repair theory.